Cranks
by The Maze Writer
Summary: The Maze was just the beginning.


**A/N: This is actually something I wrote for school. I just decided to post it here for fun. It doesn't follow the plot line exactly, but it's pretty good. You guys probably won't find it as interesting as a normal fic that I would write because you have already read The Maze Runner, but Ah well. It's still worth reading. Tell what you think to I can make it better before I hand it it to my teacher! Thanks!**

 **Prologue**

They were called Cranks.

After the sun scorched the earth, after houses and resources were destroyed in the fireballs of heat, the governments came together in an attempt to save what was left of the world. They called themselves W.I.C.K.E.D. World In Catastrophe Kill Zone Experiment Department.

Resources were few and far in-between. The population, overcrowded.

So the government released "The Flare". They flew over the cities in bergs, and shot arrows filled with the virus down at the people below. It was supposed to take down the population, leave some resources for the rest. But there were… issues.

If killing people wasn't bad enough, the virus mutated, strengthened. Suddenly, it was airborne, and then it became highly contagious. The symptoms were steadily becoming worse by the day.

At first, the only effect was a really bad headache, followed by death in the space of a few hours. By the end of only a few months, the symptoms of this terrible disease had become truly horrific.

Victims would begin feeling something wrong inside them after a few days. First, there were the headaches. Then the distemper, the anger. Slowly, their decision making would become impaired, then the hallucinations would begin. And the nightmares. In the space of a few months, they would become completely insane as the Flare ate their brain. What was left of a person after that, well, it wasn't pretty. They were nicknamed cranks. Shank meant person, and they just mixed that word with crazy and got cranks. Cranks meant Crazy shanks.

This disease was jumping from person to person, becoming extremely aggressive.

The human race was being wiped out. Fast.

The government panicked, knowing they had condemned the human species to extinction.

Or so they thought.

The new generation, the young, they could resist the disease, they could survive.

They were called the Immunes.

When the Non Immunes found out, they were furious, jealous. The jealousy led a few rogue groups to set out to attack them.

That's when W.I.C.K.E.D. stepped in.

They took the kids to a safe haven, a place away from the cranks. W.I.C.K.E.D. hoped that these kids could continue the human race.

Start the world anew.

 **Twelve years later**

Thomas was running for his life. Again.

The cranks had found them.

They had stormed their small camp, and would have gotten Minho and Teresa if Thomas and Newt hadn't woken up and fought them off.

"How did the bloody buggers find us?" Newt yelled from the back of the pack.

"I don't know!" Thomas yelled back. "Just keep going!"

As they ran across the wasteland, Thomas's mind drifted back to how they had gotten into this mess.

But he only knew what he had been told.

When he and the others had been young, only toddlers, they had been taken in by W.I.C.K.E.D. It was supposed to be a protection measure.

And it would have been fine if it had worked out that way. If they were kept there until they had grown up enough to go into the world themselves.

But W.I.C.K.E.D. lost their original motives.

Knowing that they themselves were going to catch the virus, as well as the other few million people that weren't immune, they became desperate. They started looking for a cure.

That's why the trials happened.

Shortly after the kids had turned thirteen, they were told they were going to be sent to the Maze.

Thomas and the others were told that the scientists just wanted to look for brain patterns, to see why the flare didn't affect them.

But there was another catch. To go in, their memory's had to be wiped. All the people they had know _before_ , they would be gone.

Of course, the boys didn't want to do it after hearing that.

But W.I.C.K.E.D, they didn't care. Guards stormed into the room and grabbed each child.  
They were dragged to the main lab, and their minds were erased.

They were put into the Maze, with no memory of who they were or how they had gotten there.

W.I.C.K.E.D. had convinced themselves they were doing it for the greater good.

But it was still twisted.

The Maze experiment went on for two years. But when the mortality rate rose dramatically, the trial was hastily abandoned. W.I.C.K.E.D. placed Teresa in the maze, and triggered "the ending". The kids came up in a matter of days.

With only two years of memory, survive at all cost instincts, and paranoid thoughts, the teens distrusted W.I.C.K.E.D. with every fibre of their beings.

The two groups, (now very small,) one all boys and one girl, and the other all girls and one boy, split up respectively, and busted out of the compound.

W.I.C.K.E.D. definitely should have thought that one through. Teenage boys and girls who only knew fighting and surviving were going to be a force to be reckoned with.

After all, the Maze had been filled with monsters, and the kids had all watched their friends die in front of them as the monsters, nicknamed "grievers" tore them to shreds.

It had been a little less then a year after they had escaped, and this was the seventeenth crank ambush this year.

Really, it was a miracle that there were still cranks left. This was probably because of the fact that the non immunes, in pure desperation, had locked themselves up in isolation. It prolonged their lives by a few weeks, but it didn't protect them completely. They were all slowly going insane, and the idea made them terrified.

Even the cranks hadn't killed each other off yet. That would actually have been preferable, rather than them going after the Immunes.

The problem, Thomas mused, was that Cranks could run as fast as anyone, and they had no pain sensors. They would run with limbs or chunks of flesh missing.

The only advantage they has was the fact that the cranks were completely and utterly insane.

Suddenly, Minho came up beside him, pulling him out of his memories. Still running, he held out something to Thomas. As he closed his fingers around it, Minho let go. Squinting his eyes and trying to ignore the blurring ground, he tried to get a good look at the object.

It was a gun.

Thomas let out a sigh and wondered briefly why Minho hadn't handed them out earlier.

Skidding to a stop, he turned around, pushing his legs apart and stetting his feet firmly in the ground. He placed two hands on the gun and held it out in front of himself, closing one eye as he took aim. And then he fired.

 **BANG! BANG! BANG!**

The shots rang through the air as three of the screeching cranks fell over. It was only way to stop them. Drive a bullet through their beating hearts or right through their brains.

More shots filled the air as his friends joined in. Thomas picked up his own weapon and began firing again. In under a minute, ten body's littered the ground.

Bile rose in Thomas's throat as he looked at the bloody bodies. He turned away, closing is eyes and taking a deep breath.

It had been necessary. He knew that. He was just putting them out of their misery. They weren't human anymore.

But that didn't make him feel any better.

He turned his attention to Minho, who was staring at the end of his smoking gun.

"If you had those to begin with, why did we run?"

He knew it wasn't really important, what was done was done, but he needed to distract himself.

The burly Asian turned around and gave him a look.

"I didn't exactly have time to hand them out while I was being choked by those cranks this morning," he replied sarcastically, in typical Minho style.

"You should have thought ahead," Thomas muttered.

Minho's eyes narrowed.

"Oi! This isn't exactly important right now!" interrupted Newt in his heavy British accent, glaring at the two other boys.

"Tommy, we have to get going or the cranks will find us again."

"Bu where are we going to go?" butted in Teresa.

Silence.

It was a sore spot with everyone that they really had no place to go. Nobody wanted them because they were Immune. They were different, born with a genetic defect that left them better off than the others.

The ground suddenly became fascinating.

Teresa sighed.

She turned around and began walking again.

She hadn't said anything, but she was right. They had to get moving. There was no point dwelling on facts that were only going to depress them.

So they started walking again.

Thomas took the time to actually look at their surroundings.

He didn't know where they were exactly, he didn't know if they were in North America or Europe or Asia. Sadly there wasn't much left of wherever they came from. The world was hanging on by a very thin thread.

The place where they were now wasn't too bad. The ground was hard and cracked, the sky a sandy yellow orange. Thomas didn't like letting things surprise him, but he couldn't stop his eyes from widening as he saw some real, alive trees. That was something he hadn't seen in a long time.

Teresa slowed down so she could walk beside him.

"We need to find water Tom."

"I know."

"And food."

"I know," he replied again, dumbly.

"We could go to the forest," she suggested, pointing.

Thomas turned his head in that direction. To call it a forest was wishful thinking.

But there was a small clump of trees and bushes, looking very out of place in this vast, empty landscape.

Still, it could have any number of things in it, you never know.

So they starting walking towards it, hope heavy in their hearts.

….

They were very fortunate. The small canopy of trees kept them and the small stream inside protected from the harsh sun.

The first thing they did was crawl onto their stomachs to lap up the water. Then they splashed their hand and faces, taking off the months of dirt, dust, and blood that had layered there overtime. Teresa bent over even more and stuck her head in the water, her fingers running through her hair as she rinsed out twigs and clumps of leaves that had made a nest there.

The boys looked at each other and shrugged, before following her example. Thomas's own brown hair had gone stiff over time, and it felt nice for it to be soft again.

When they brought their heads out of the water, small rivers of the liquid wiggled down their necks and flowed down their shirts, making them damp.

Then sun that was filtering through the canopy caught Newts hair, making it shine bright gold. It was quite a change from the dull dirty blonde that the dust had made it.

Minho's hair, as dark as Teresa's, (though not as long,) was standing up at weird angles and Thomas tried not to laugh.

After the hilarity of the situation died down, he got right to business, the others following his example as they all started unloading their backpacks and putting water into every container they could find.

When they had finished, they split up to look for food.

Thomas's own search turned out pretty well. He found a small apple tree to pick clean, a few mint leaves, and some gooseberries.

He turned around and heading back to their meeting place (the stream.)

Everyone seemed to have done well.

Teresa found some cedar bark, (it wasn't their food of choice but they all agreed it tasted better than any of the other kind of bark,) and quite a lot of blackberry's.

Newt had climbed the trees to look for eggs, (which was quite a feat considering he had a limp in his leg from an injury he got in the Maze,) and he come back with quite a few. Of course, by now they were going to be a little expired, but it was still better than nothing.

Minho had done the best. He had found some dead rodents that had been littering the forest floor. The best part was that they were whole and not rotten. They could be cooked over a fire.

With their spoils packed safely in their bags, the teenagers walked out of the woods and into the darkening sky of the night with the body's clean, thirst quenched, and bags packed.

…

They found a small cave in the rocks and set up camp there. Newt started a small fire and they roasted one of the wild mice.

They were all in reasonably good spirits as they rationed out the mouse, an egg, and some bark. After such a long time without food, everything tasted amazing. They even had berries for desert.

So when they lay down for the night, huddling together to keep warm in the dropping temperatures, Thomas didn't exactly feel full, but he was content.

He lay on his side, watching the stars that were twinkling and glistening in the distance.

When they first got out he thought everything from then on would be easy. Surly, after facing the horrors of the Maze, they were ready for anything. Bu he was wrong.

His whole life now revolved around a few things. Every day was the same, like they completed twenty four hours and then someone pressed repeat.

Find food. Find water. Find shelter. Stay alive. Fight Cranks. Look for a permanent place to start a new life.

Some days, especially at night, he would feel his heart get heavy and negativity fill his thoughts. They weren't going to get out. They were stuck. It was useless.

He was tired of running.

But a lot of their friends had died so they could make it this far. They couldn't give up.

 _He_ couldn't give up.

So he would fight.

After all, the Maze was just the beginning.


End file.
